Hamming, Intro to The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (March 28, 1995)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN regularly recommends Hamming's lecture series as a fascinating, wisdom-rich course on how to approach hard technical problems and a career, often preferred to the book.
What it is
The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2016 to 2020.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec hydandata · 2016-02 · on “Why There Is No Hitchhiker’s Guide to Mathematics for Programmers”
I love programming, but never got the hang of Mathematics due to various reasons. Failed a big project as a solo programmer long time ago, when I was 17, because I could not create the necessary mathematical model and no help was available, with everything else completed, infrastructure, web site/interface database etc. Soon afterwards set off on a different career path, but always kept an intimate relationship with programming, doing some both at work and for fun at home. Recently, after watching R.W. Hamming lectures and reading his book "Art of Doing Science and Engineering" [1] [2] decided that I would try learning mathematics again. I found it really hard to do. There are so many implic
Strong rec charlysl · 2018-09 · on “How to teach yourself hard things”
If your are interested in learning hard subjects, I highly recommend Richard Hamming's wonderful course The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn [1], and the related book [2] [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]
Strong rec yesenadam · 2019-02 · on “Ask HN: Best Online Courses?”
Sapolsky - Biology of Human Behavior 25 lectures [LINK] It's accessible to laymen, no prior knowledge needed. It covers so many different fields and levels of knowledge ("buckets" Sapolsky calls them), different ways of explaining human behaviour. By the signals in their brain, or the hormones in their blood, or what happened that day, or their childhood, or their genes, or evolution of humans etc. Also looks at other animals. A lot of touching/funny/inspiring/poignant stories about scientists in the field(s). Sapolsky is an amazing lecturer/raconteur. Hamming - Learning to Learn 32 lectures [this video] The famous "You and your research" is one lecture in this, but every one of them is fascinati
Recommends yesenadam · 2018-09 · on “You and Your Research (1986)”
I love all his books - you get the know-how, not just know-that. But the complete Learning to Learn lectures are on youtube, which is even better: [this video]
Cites dmos62 · 2019-05 · on “Highly Compressed Richard Hamming's Lectures”
These are encoded with Speex, the precursor to opus. If you actually want to download the audio, you can use youtube-dl to get opus encoded audio-only recordings directly: > youtube-dl -F [this video] [youtube] [this video] Downloading webpage [youtube] [this video] Downloading video info webpage [info] Available formats for [this video] format code extension resolution note 249 webm audio only DASH audio 51k , opus @ 50k, 16.97MiB 250 webm audio only DASH audio 57k , opus @ 70k, 17.50MiB 171 webm audio only DASH audio 99k , vorbis@128k, 31.57MiB 251 webm audio only DASH audio 106k , opus @160k, 32.55MiB 140 m4a audio only DASH audio 132k , m4a_dash container, mp 4a.40.2@128k, 43.56MiB 160 mp4 194x144 144p 69k
Cites pinkrobotics · 2020-08 · on “Ask HN: Ambitious robotics entrepreneur with failing Kickstarter. Seeking advice”
Your image and words remind me of this: [this video] Marketing and sales are the domains I am the worst at, maybe we should chat. Though, while I do foresee a market for carbon, I do not see much in the way for climate solving robots, only return is saving the world ;)